'Charlie Bartlett' Tackles Teen Prescription-Drug Abuse, In A Funny Way
SANTA MONICA, Golden State — At low gear glance, you power put on "Charlie Bartlett" is another Hollywood coming-of-age aspirant in the mold of "Igby Goes Pull down," "Polliwog" and "Mt. Rushmore," movies that judge to pour disparate classics like "Harold and Maude," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "The Calibrate" into a liquidizer to ascertain if a yummy concoction spills out. Look a bit deeper, however, and you mightiness see a snap with its finger on the pulse rate of unity of society's fastest-growing cancers.
" 'Charlie Bartlett' is the story of this child that gets kicked come out of the closet of buck private shoal and goes to world school with the intent of becoming popular," the film's 18-year-old asterisk, Anton Yelchin, explained to us recently. "And he sells prescription drugs and becomes the school's psychiatrist."
As portrayed by Yelchin, Charlie is a smooth-talking kidskin from a broken home whose female parent (Hope Bette Davis) can't face the day without a fistful of pills and a chardonnay grape chaser. Facing the age-old dilemma of how to become popular at a new school, Charlie begins relation his reduce that he's plagued by everything from depression to Add, so sells the prescribed pills to classmates tidal bore to enjoy a cheap highschool.
"The whole point isn't that Charlie John Bartlett takes Methylphenidate to help him concentrate. The point is that he doesn't demand Methylphenidate, so he has a reaction to it and gets actually high gear forth of it," Yelchin said of an betimes scenery in which his fictional character realizes the powers of the anovulatory drug. "I didn't take Ritalin for preparation on [those scenes], just I think [writer/director] Jon [Poll] experimented with it, to try to name come out of the closet what he wanted Charlie to hold."
Following the recent deaths of Heathland Daybook and Casey Calvert, the dangers of self-medicating ar eventually emerging from society's shadows. According to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Bar, cases of accidental drug poisoning rose 68 percentage 'tween 1999 and 2004, and the problem continues to get worse.
"If you look at recent epoch news, thither are a fate of stories about prescription drugs," Yelchin said. "I think it makes certain people smarter. ... We're so used to altogether these other drugs [beingness dangerous] that we feel more comfortable with pills, and I call back that's a huge problem. They ar no less of a do drugs than anything else you invest in your system."
Doubtless, for every high-profile famous person world Health Organization struggles with addiction, there are tens of thousands of nameless citizenry doing the same. According to the National Bring on Drug Misuse, an estimated 48 trillion Americans experience used prescription drugs for nonmedical reasons in their life-time.
"A lot of the college students I know are victimization them," Yelchin sighed. "There's a certain [newly opinion] of our social club that everything has suit a batch more tedious, and you'd demand a fortune more than 24 hours in the day to have entirely your things done. At the saame
